Sweet Summer Sixteen
by Chyme for the Rhyme
Summary: Aikka goes on holiday. To Earth. Unsurprisingly, it's all Eva's fault. 'I've kept my promise and shown you my world. Now I want you to show me yours.'


Sometimes, Eva felt sick. Sick of staying in one place, in one house, in a city firmly rooted to the earth. It was stifling and about as far away from the stars as you could get, stars Eva had walked beneath, had felt her face being bathed by as she traveled through their alien light, all to make an impossible wish real. They had been there as she set her sight on almost-as-impossible racetracks, ones coated by ten-thousand year old dust or bathed over by clover-shaped green. Some had even been dusted over with snow or – and here was the strangest - held up over lakes of acid. And all this achieved before she turned sixteen.

So naturally, after that, life felt quieter, locked in by restrictions from a father who had to re-learn how to be one. And, while she adored every minute of it, to her surprise she still felt restless, some shot of misplaced adrenalin making her insides jittery. Perhaps she had simply been born with stars in her veins, falling ones with streaked tails that ended in her heart and not her head; for she could already feel the call to race, to travel and explore. It made her wonder if her mother had ever felt the same way, if maybe she hadn't needed Don's words to sway her when she entered the Grand Prix, all those years ago.

Hereditary or not, she kept the urge inside her low, spending the summer in Nourasia under Aikka's watchful, if pleasant eye and laughing to see her dad struggle against the urge to bring bug repellent with them both. And it was good. Nourasia felt giant the way she had always thought it should. It was all shadowed trees and explosions of wildlife, leaves curling out to touch sun-baked cities that had aged as well as Prague.

And then one day, while holding a drink steady in his hand, Aikka turned to her and asked to see Earth.

'It would make a change of pace,' he told her. 'I've kept my promise and shown you my world. Now I want you to show me yours.'

Eva could picture the worry that would line the face of King Lao, along with the appalled gaze of the courtiers, however friendly most of them were to her. It would cause havoc, the lone heir to the throne desiring to go to a planet whose leaders had traditionally looked down upon the Nourasians, pronouncing their magic to be primitive and lacklustre in comparison to weapons wrought by steel.

Which was why there was no hesitation in her voice when she next spoke.

'Okay,' she said, with an accompanying wink to greet the idea. 'Let's make it a date.'

* * *

Urgh. Such auspicious words. Eva pressed a foot down into sand and felt it give, almost rolling down a dune that would have been like a mountain to her when she clambered back up, before Aikka grasped her hand.

'Careful,' he said, yanking her straight into the shadow at his side.

Eva followed the dark strike of it with her eyes, seeing it sprawl out into a golden curve that fell rapidly like the coil of a snake before it buckled and rose into another dune.

'Damn,' she said, 'Aikka, why are you so attracted to the desert?'

'Great Kings of your past lived here, or in places similar,' he said, carefully readjusting the back pack that clung to his shoulders – and wasn't that a funny sight? 'And yet the places considered powerful now, in your world, are governed by people as close to the label of kings you refuse to call them; they seek to escape these places.'

'Can't blame 'em,' Eva muttered, her hand rising up to shield her face as she squinted into the distance. 'I kind of want to escape _here_ , right now.' She cast an eye over Aikka. 'Next time, we'll go to Egypt and I'll let you gaze at pyramids.'

'Impressive, I'll admit. But here, there are no buildings seeking to dismantle the sky; nothing at all in the way of this vivid blue.'

'Except sand hills,' Eva said, refusing to be impressed. Sure, she kind of was when they first got here; but the constant weight of the sun on their backs and the low levels of water left in their bottles had quickly made it lose its appeal.

'You thought everything on Oban, beautiful. And my planet, too. Why don't you cast the same judgement on your own world?'

Eva bit her lip. 'I can't; I love engines and star racers and all the ways that make them tick. All the steel and oil you put into them and the way they rumble to life under my hands; it's like feeling something being born. But I'm not stupid, Aikka. I know what it costs us, costs our planet, to make these things. I've seen the way you frown when you see our logging factories and read about deforestation. And I get it, I do. But it makes me feel ashamed of what I love. And I don't know how to deal with that.'

Aikka turned to her, shocked, his expression wide and vulnerable. Eva hated that, the way he looked like a kicked puppy, unbearably sweet and with none of the stubborn awkwardness Jordan had possessed in spades. It always made her want to soften and sometimes, quite viciously, she hated herself for it.

'I never meant to hurt you,' Aikka said, his expression settling on apologetic. 'I don't want you to feel ashamed. But you earthlings do things so differently to us and sometimes, it reminds me of the Crogs and the way they seek to rip the living heart out of every world they visit.'

He reached for her, perhaps to bump fists, or simply to touch the very edge of her sweat-soaked hair. It was a gesture he had been playing with recently, almost gingerly, as if were afraid she'd rush away, startled.

'But I never, never want you to feel hurt as you do the things you love. That would be like...putting out a spark.'

He smiled, fingertips just trailing the ends of dark strands, almost as if he could see inside her head and watch her fighting the instinct to step away.

'I can't help you with 'dealing.' But perhaps you might give me a warning, such as a word in my ear, or a tap on the shoulder. Anything at all, if I do something that makes you feel ashamed.'

Eva stared at him, noting, not for the first time, how her face was now level with his eyes. In a few months, she'd be taller, her life racing away to leave him behind. She wondered if there would ever come a time when she would feel him too young for her.

'I'm not afraid to speak up for myself, Aikka,' she said slowly, 'and I'm hardly about to start now.'

She shook her head stubbornly, chasing away the ends of his fingers with the quick recoil of her hair. She could barely see, what with the sweat running into her eyes, but the strands seemed to flare out like fire, taking on a life of their own as they glanced across his skin and without waiting to see if he'd flinched, she marched past him, determined not to hear his answer.

For a while she tuned everything out, including the rush of seeing such a blue sky overhead. The trick, she told herself, was to hold both her imagination and eyes steady, focusing on the crunch of her boots meeting sand, of hearing them sink down and carry her forwards, skirting through hills, like she was back on Oban again. Just moving. Steadily. Carrying on. Eventually her thoughts sunk down with her motions, each footstep cracking against her consciousness like a whip.

Hot, she thought. Dry. Dust. Or sand. It was all the same to Eva and the things that gripped her boots. She sank, she swam through visions of gold and a sky so blue she half-expected her mother to pop up and smile at her.

She giggled. 'Okaaay Aikkaaaa, I geeet it, I doooo...it's heeeaaven.'

She fell to the side, no, no, that wasn't right, she was _pulled_. Aikka's arm was suddenly cutting into the skin of her back, bracing against the span of her shoulders as she peered up, into the elegant shadow cast against the sky. Aaaand that was Aikka's face, she realised after a shuddering long moment. He looked uncharacteristically dark.

'I'm been rather stupid.'

She felt his voice from far away, tentatively prodding her ears as though they were an unexplored city. She giggled again.

'Eva!'

An earthquake ran through her in time to his panicked shout and everything blurred, even more than it had before. And then his face fell into focus, sharply, like a drop in temperature when a cloud was thrown against the sun.

'Molly!'

Oh. He had shaken her. And used both the names her dad had loved her by.

She felt her tongue in her mouth, swollen and heavy, cracked almost in two with a pain that longed for water. Urgh. Talking would be a chore. But she forced herself to manage anyway.

'Penny...penny for your thoughts, Aikka? Want to know mine?'

He looked relieved.

'Always.'

'I think...I've been out in the sun too long.'

'Yes. You have at that.'

With a grunt he lifted her, spinning her round to his back and pulling her arms firmly over his shoulders. Eva felt herself smile, warm and sloppy as his hands fumbled slightly before finding the bend in both her knees, giggling slightly as her feet swung down below his hips.

'A piggyback from a prince? I'm honoured.'

'As you should be. I doubt it will happen again.'

Liar, thought Eva, oddly content as they set off. It'll happen for as many times as I need it.

* * *

After that episode, Aikka didn't suggest visiting anywhere hot.

'It was my mistake,' he said gravely. 'We need to go somewhere where there are plenty of people around, somewhere where we can get aid if one of us collapses.'

Eva scowled from her place on the hospital bed. 'Where do you suggest? The north pole?'

His lips twitched as he watched her fight back the visible urge to scratch at the drip attached to her arm. It threaded into her skin like small, nearly invisible pipe, reminding him of the healers of his home world and the chants they used to animate vines and press their ends into the blood vessels that lay below the surface of the skin. He supposed it performed a similar function to this IV drip, acting as a delivery systems for patients who were too weak to feed themselves.

'While I am curious to see the beauty of these Northern Lights I've heard described, it seems unwise to exchange one extreme for the other. Neither of us wants to freeze. However...cute I've heard the penguins may be.'

'...I'm pretty sure they only live at the South Pole. It's the polar bears who hang out at the North.'

'All the more reason for us not to go there,' he carried on smoothly. But he was gratified to see her smile all the same.

'Oh Aikka...I know it sounds stupid, but sometimes I forget you're really not from around here.'

'My mother always taught me that it was a compliment of the highest order, for a foreign friend to forget which parts of their conversation you might feel a stranger to.'

'Sounds like a moral picked from a children's story.'

'I suppose, in a way it might be. But it feels very true of us, all the same.'

Eva's look became pensive. 'You know, there is someplace I've always wanted to go.'

He leaned forward, eagerly, forgetting the manners Canaan had attempted to drive in him ever since he was a small child. He could still remember the mutterings that followed him after lessons, down hallways that echoed with the sharp disapproval of his teacher's ill-humour, mutterings that the prince behaved as though there were a child still living inside his body, ready to come out and reclaim the man, even as he grew. Aikka had been terrified for the first few months ,expecting some sort of lurking presence to make itself known within his mind, ready to take over his body at a moment's notice. Even now, it made his hands clench within the bed-sheets to think of it.

He started as Eva frowned, her touch gentle on the backs of his fingers as she reached over to give his hands a consoling pat, looking a little confused as she did so.

'It's nothing really, just... I once asked my father where he took my mother on their honeymoon. Oh! You might not know but it's kinda like a holiday and celebration rolled into one when someone marries somebody else.'

Her eyes took on a distant look as one of her hands settled more firmly upon one of his own. It didn't squeeze at his skin or even fidget. Just lay there, settled, letting a careful slice of warmth linger against his knuckles as she continued speaking.

'They went to this place called Venice. It's like a city that lives side by side with the water, all these canals threaded through it. People travel by boat instead of road, like they're stuck in time or something. I dunno, somehow it reminds me of you when I say it aloud.'

Aikka thought about this, about how nature settled side-by-side with the cities of his homeworld. He thought about the rivers on Earth and how eventually, if he followed them long enough, they turned brown, coursing through cities where people carelessly tipped their rubbish into their swirling depths. And then he looked at Eva, at her tentative smile.

He couldn't imagine a city where humans lived harmoniously with water. Couldn't imagine them not turning it murky and black each time they rowed across. But he could well imagine both the guilt and anger on Eva's face when he told her this and the way she would subdue her own emotion by pressing her fist into the sheets, and how she would pointedly take her hand away from his own.

So, rather pointedly himself, he tilted the hand she had covered to the side, just enough to form a hollow into which her fingers could fall. She looked at him, a confused blush on her face as he smiled, his fingers carefully curling over her own.

'I would be honoured to see this city that reminds you so much of me.' He let his smile harden a little, successfully turning it polite. Canaan, he thought, would be proud.

* * *

Venice, was, to his relief, not without it's beauty. The streets reeked of history, the stones set within the buildings dripping with something that was, if the humans had ever allowed it to grow, akin to the magic that coated the streets of his own home, light years away. Aikka felt the hum of it right down to his bones, felt it press and coil round the cobbles he and Eva walked over, before it slid through the cracks Eva slapped her sandals against. All worlds had magic, this he knew. But Earth's was rotten, rift with the decay of malnourishment and being continually ignored.

Not all the humans' fault; this development had been set in course centuries ago when they had first turned to machinery instead of traditions. And it was, he admitted to himself, not as if other worlds weren't guilty of the same fate.

He and Eva crossed a canal and perched on wooden seats that felt more like simple planks of wood then benches. Then they ate ice cream and Aikka watched, amused, as melted chocolate ran across the bridge of Eva's nose. She smirked and ran her fingers against his jaw when he pointed this out to her, leaving the taste to dangle tantalising close to his mouth. He wondered at her boldness and took another bite of banana-flavoured cone. Fruity flavours, he was finding, were about all he could take.

Afterwards they visited various chapels and Aikka marveled at the quiet inside, at the rich decoration that coated the altar, at how each place put its own artistic spin on religion. The churches of Venice, he discovered did not limit themselves to the tawdry glint of gold and other traditional metals; no, there was material that reminded him of marble here, and stone that gleamed wetly with green and pink and other muted reds, as though there was invisible water splashing against their sides, water that would never quite finish glistening off their curved surface. Yet, to his naked eye, the pillars they helped form seemed as dry as could be.

Eva huffed quietly at his side, her eyes drawn to the candles he saw other humans bend their heads over. She was annoyed, he could tell, whether by their pretence of servitude to the flames, or by the fact that she had to wrap the sight of her legs away under the hem of a long skirt. It was cheap, the colour of a blank canvas and she had had to rake out money from her purse for it after they had been refused entry at the first chapel they tried.

'Oh no,' Eva had whispered in mock-horror at his side. 'Human skin! How terrible!' Then she cackled at the affronted look a nearby stranger had given her. 'Ha! Just imagine if I had said 'Women's skin' instead!'

Remembering the slightly bitter look on her face and the way her words had not really felt like a joke, Aikka leaned forward. 'What's wrong?'

Eva grimaced. 'It's too, I don't know, _sad._ Those candles aren't gonna stay lit forward. I think people would prefer to be remembered outside, in the grass and under the sky, you know? With flowers and stuff.'

She wasn't talking solely of herself, Aikka knew. He took her hand again and tugged at it carefully.

'Do you want another ice-cream?'

She grinned at him. But it was a sad, muted thing and it failed to touch her eyes. They looked as lifeless as the stone Aikka had so admired a minute before.

'You're just trying to make me fat.'

He blinked.

'No...but if that is the result of us gorging ourselves, well, then at least we will be fat together.'

She didn't choose chocolate this time. She chose strawberry. And it was Aikka, this time, who, rather daringly, held a cone that allowed brown to dribble down over his tongue. The sweetness was thick and cloying, uprooting and raking over his taste-buds with a ferocity that surprised him. It was not bad. But it did not feel particularly soft and it lacked the same uplifting tang he had found so pleasant in the banana flavour.

'I do not think I like chocolate,' he informed Eva after he had finished.

She stared at him. And then her eyes glinted. 'Sinner.'

He smiled faintly. 'I offend your own sense of religion?'

She crossed her legs, waving the remnants of her own cone at him in a gesture that he supposed was meant to be generous. Whatever the case, it was kindly meant, to so he leaned forward and licked. And then paused, surprised.

The flavour, instead of simply bursting into his mouth, seemed to melt instead, settling into his tongue as though it were an old friend. It tasted slightly milky, the creamy sensation somehow enriched by the cold rather than enflamed by it, the way chocolate had felt. He sat back, savouring the feeling before leaning forward once again, perhaps a little too eagerly.

'May I?'

'Knock yourself out.'

He blinked at the phrasing but decided not to take it literally. Either way, he ended up with Eva's cone in his hand and the pleasing sight of a real smile back on her face. All in all, he counted it as a win.

* * *

Later that night, the city came alive with lights, making the water appear hungry and dark as it slunk beneath the bridges, waves edged with reflections of gold. Aikka watched them bob and crash open like hundreds of gleaming mouths, as the buildings above, so pale in contrast, played the perfect conductors for the easy yellow glow of candles and windows that saturated their sides.

Eva tugged his hand.

'Come on,' she said, smiling. 'What you see here is beautiful, but this time it's the human craftsmanship I really want to see you goggle at.'

Laughing, she led him down side-streets decorated by the yawning mouths of cafes and small tourist kisoaks. Umbrellas and shawls flashed at him from within, each one acting as a glow-worm for the dizzying spill of light that echoed all around. Eva grinned at him from in front, almost haloed by the rush of casual gold that filtered in on either side of them. It made Aikka's heart beat fast.

And then she yanked him to a stop.

'Look,' she said proudly.

Aikka looked. And was intrigued by the masks he saw on display; Eva saw his eyes following each careful curve of the designs, every sequined swirl and ridge of plaster that jutted away to form horns or the grotesque swell of jester bells. One in particular he stopped to run a gentle hand over, some garishly decorated unicorn head, complete with a long spiral of a horn that was gifted with silver. It put Eva in mind of the fake icicles that were popular in the Christmas season, the ones that shone with a marble-like elegance, so much so that people loved to hang them from their trees.

'No,' she said point-blank when he turned an earnest eye upon her. 'Just, no, Aikka.'

He sighed. 'I know. It would be cumbersome to take it with me back to Nourasia. I could well imagine the look on Canaan's face if I returned with such a thing, much less wear it.' His mouth tilted to the side, becoming a little wry, maybe even mischievous.

'Forget that,' Eva said, smiling to see him happy, 'can you imagine the faces on security, seeing you trying to see you smuggle out a unicorn mask of all things?'

'Mm.' Aikka's hand dropped away, his smile falling with it. 'Yes. I might be accused of trying to procure a blade.'

Eva shook her head. 'Perhaps we just stick to getting you a postcard like a normal tourist.'

'A normal tourist,' Aikka murmured. 'Yes, what I wouldn't give, to be one of those.'

* * *

It had been fun, Eva reflected, once their time was happy. Fun, like taking out a party dress and letting it swing off her hips for a special occasion. Not that she really wore party dresses as a rule, but then Aikka wasn't really someone she could take out for a 'spin' and suffer no consequences for. He was a prince, one doomed to outgrow her.

'Goodbye Eva,' he murmured softly.

She offered him a small smile, gentling the bitterness of it with a wink. 'Goodbye, your highness.'

The bitterness almost vanished when he chuckled. Almost. But it came back full-force when suddenly, with the same quickness that had had her wrenching her hair from his hands in the desert, he leaned forward and kissed her.

Eva froze. She felt his tongue blur against her lips as though afraid to demand and press, to insist on wedging her mouth open. Almost daringly, she felt her jaws part, her breath rushing hot and heavy into his own, as though this were the end to an everyday fling, and they were just another couple choosing to part over a kiss.

She shivered and his arms wrapped round her briefly in apology. She shivered again at the sensation; Aikka wasn't one for giving out hugs. He usually looked so lost, hands grasping air when she initiated one. Perhaps the gravity of the sensation was weighing in on him just as it was on her.

They parted, her eyes opening to become lost in his face, to witness the breathless joy there. She wondered if he saw a similar sort of happiness mirrored on her own.

'Well,' Aikka finally said, hand reaching up to wipe the salvia threatening to fall from his lip. 'At least Canaan wasn't there to see that.' He gave her a quick assessing look. 'Will you come to Nourasia next year?'

Eva smiled. 'If you'll have me.'

Both of them were careful not to ruminate on for how much longer that might be for.

* * *

 **Notes:** According to the official Oban Star Racers art book, Nourasia's orbit round the respective 'sun' in its system is much longer than that of Earth's, meaning that a single Nourasian year is easily worth a few of our own. As a result Nourasian's age slower than humans and thus live longer. So by the time Eva is an elderly lady, Aikka would probably be middle aged.

So yeah, realistically Eva is, in a sense, eventually going to outgrow Aikka. She'll have reached adulthood quite a bit sooner than he will.

Them's the breaks.


End file.
